Booming City, Flush With Rats and Dying Children

From their two-room shack that clings to the hillside next to a gully carrying raw sewage through one of this city's many slums, Georgine Meme and her nine children set out each morning in search of life's basics.

While her smallest children scrounge about for firewood, older children fetch water for bathing and cooking from a communal tap. The teen-age boys, meanwhile, look for odd jobs, anything to bring home the small change that makes up the family budget.

For Mrs. Meme, an illiterate 42-year-old widow, the difficult trick, repeated daily, is putting the meager finds together well enough to keep her family in food and clothes.

''Life here in Kinshasa is miserable,'' Mrs. Meme declared. ''I wake up every morning not knowing what we will eat that day. We owe our survival to the providence of God.''

As bad as things are in Zaire's crowded capital, since coming here as a young woman from her native village in a neighboring province Mrs. Meme has become thoroughly accustomed to life in the city. Even if peasants often manage to live better at home with at least their own produce to eat, Mrs. Meme, having adopted the fears and prejudices of city people against villagers with their ancestral ways of life and belief in witchcraft, said nothing short of starvation could make her want to go back.

Every day Mrs. Meme's story is repeated by the thousands, as wave after wave of peasants from all over Zaire make their way to Kinshasa in search of a better life. Few find one.

Nobody knows for sure how big Kinshasa has become, with estimates varying between five and eight million. But what is certain is that with annual growth thought by some experts to be as high 14 percent, this sprawling city, like a score of others across Africa, is expanding at a rate that would defy the best of urban planning or management.

And here there is no planning or management. Zaire, a vast country of 45 million, lives virtually without Government and Kinshasa is no different. Urban development experts and city officials say that even more than Lagos, Nigeria, which is famous for its violent crime, or Nairobi, Kenya, with its huge, fetid slums, this central African capital strung out along the banks of the Congo River has become a living experiment in the consequences of unbridled growth.

''Today, Kinshasa, with its five million inhabitants is dying of its own weight,'' said Bernadin Mungul Diaka, a politician who was until recently the city's top official. ''We are not governed, the city is bankrupt, and most of our people live a situation that can only be called untenable.''

Residents of Kinshasa, where 60 percent of working-age people are thought to be unemployed, commonly use a term that describes the daily survival routines lives of nearly everyone here: ''Systeme D,'' or ''debrouillardise,'' a French word that means resourcefulness.

For unpaid civil servants, whose salaries in any event are worth only the equivalent of a dollar or two per month, that means abandoning their offices to wander the streets, selling whatever goods they can. Some trade on the authority of their offices, selling to the highest bidder everything from construction permits and land titles to clean bills of health for uninspected buildings.

Others hustle any way they can, from engaging in petty commerce across the river with Brazzaville, the capital of Congo, to trading Zaire's steadily shrinking currency in one of the many open-air money markets.

A result, by day, is a city that bustles like an ant colony, but has none of the order. The once majestic broad boulevards of Kinshasa, carved out under Belgian colonial rule, are choked with small businesses, many housed in ship cargo containers whose steel walls have been cut to provide windows, and whose power, if any, is supplied from pirated connections that dangle from the municipal grid.

With crime rampant, at night the streets, with their pollution-clouded air and eerie quiet, are abandoned by all but an occasional scavenger dressed in tatters. Block after block of what was the scene of intense activity only a few hours before are given over to emptiness.

Last year, a health crisis erupted when, depending upon whose version one believes, city officials either made off with funds budgeted for the chlorine used to purify the municipal water supply, or the money for that purpose simply ran out. A result was a surge in cholera and dysentery.

Doctors here say that the drama of that outbreak, which received international attention including emergency funds for chlorine donated from abroad, only served to obscure the tragedy of everyday life here.

''You name it -- cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria -- we have epidemics here all the time that never get any attention,'' said Richard Omombo, a doctor who runs a small clinic in the Livulu neighborhood, where Mrs. Meme and her family live. ''When I started my practice in 1982, the Government had a national vaccination program, but no longer. People used to be able to afford to buy medicines for themselves, but now the poverty is such that people wait until they are practically dead before they come forward for care.

''The hardest thing to watch is the toll on children, who are dying here at a very high rate.''

With government absent, the only organizing force in much of Kinshasa is at the neighborhood level, either in the form of citizens' groups or elected district councils. And as groups like this multiply, people say the existence of well-functioning councils can mean the difference between life and death.

In a neighborhood known as Lemba, a cleanliness contest was recently organized, aimed at ridding the streets of huge mounds of rotting waste that blocked sewage canals and drew armies of rats.

''The houses of Lemba were built with families of five children each in mind, and today, you look around and there are 30 people in a home that has no working plumbing,'' said Felicien Kimbukusu, the district commissioner who mounted the cleanliness drive. ''Like Zaire, Kinshasa has been moving backwards in time.''

Throughout Lemba these days, garbage its carted in wheelbarrows to a central dump, where organic and industrial waste are separated for processing. While glass, plastic and paper are sold, organic wastes are stockpiled in huge compost heaps that, after weeks of decay, are bagged and sold as fertilizer. Revenues from operations like this are used to pay for the neighborhood's efforts to manage itself.

''Old ladies around here still remind us that in the days of the Belgians trucks came and picked up the trash, and airplanes dusted the city against mosquitoes,'' said Mr. Kimbukusu. ''Well, we don't have trucks anymore, and we certainly don't have the airplanes, but we've got to live here and that means we've got to try something.''